The Kauffman House and the Holzwarth Ranch
Near Grand Lake, Colorado
Near the boardwalk stands the Kauffman House, the only log hotel built in Grand Lake before nineteen hundred that still survives. Ezra Kauffman put it up in eighteen ninety two, hauling hand hewn logs from his own homestead in what is now Rocky Mountain National Park, and he ran it as a hotel until his death in nineteen twenty. His widow and daughters kept it going as a summer tourist hotel until the Second World War.
Today it is a museum, saved and restored by the Grand Lake Area Historical Society, a window into the mining, trapping, fishing, and tourist world of early Grand County. A few miles north, up in the Kawuneeche Valley, is another survivor from the same era, the Holzwarth Trout Lodge. A German immigrant named John Holzwarth moved his family here in nineteen seventeen and built a cattle ranch along the young Colorado River.
Guests kept showing up, so the family opened a trout lodge and later a full dude ranch. In nineteen seventy four the Holzwarths sold the land to the Nature Conservancy so it could be preserved, and the original lodge buildings still stand, restored to look as they did in the nineteen twenties, a preserved slice of homestead life at the foot of the Never Summer peaks.
